Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
None of the sites I actively manage have seen any change, but one that I've consulted on has been decimated. Before October it was 3rd for some one and 2 kw searches. It dropped a couple spots around Oct 20th. Dropped a couple more on Dec 7th, then went to page 3 on Dec 20th. Is now fluctuating between page 6 and farther back.
This site has been up for about a year, and no real changes were made during this drop. All other sites in the serps for these keywords stayed in place except one - the #2 site. It was previously THE authority site, but had been moved and had a 301 redirect to the #1, new authority site. #2 dropped a little on Dec 7th, then to page 3 on Dec 20th. After the 20th, there have been a few days when the #2 site has moved back up and is now back at #2, while the site I've consulted on has dropped further, usually at the same time #2 moved back up.
While it may be that G has made no changes to the algo, I'm convinced they tweaked the weighting on some "filters" that resulted in these changes. Both sites were unchanged, yet bounced around at the exact same times. The dropped site had too much duplicate content and not enough good links from trusted sites. It was also heavily optimized for a few keywords.
I can't figure what factors caused the #2 site to drop and then recover, but it seems that G tweaked some things a little Dec 7th, hit the same things harder Dec 20th, then adjusted some in following days which brought the #2 site back up to #2. Hopefully they will continue to adjust and bring back the rankings for those who have been unjustly dropped...
[edited by: tedster at 9:57 pm (utc) on Jan. 1, 2007]
Whoa -- there's some feedback that doesn't fit the pattern!
FWIW, here is a timeline of significant events for my site. Everything was going good until:
June 27 - lost all rankings.
Sept 16 - rankings returned.
Sept 30 - lost all rankings again.
Oct 21 - rankings returned.
Nov 29 - lost all rankings again.
Dec 3 - rankings returned.
Dec 27 - lost all rankings again.
Jan 3 - (yesterday) rankings returned.
Jan 4 - (today) rankings lost about two hours ago
Think of it this way, When you shrink the index, you also shrink the amount of real time PR that is out there.
If you remove a million pages, there is a million pages not passing PR.
So there is a trickle down effect.
Think about if they were a million pages with PR of 5 or more.....
Big effect...
[edited by: trinorthlighting at 10:02 pm (utc) on Jan. 4, 2007]
Yup another data refresh in the past hours, with another random penalization and unpenalization of pages.
There are few entities more stubborn about their utter ineptness than Google.
one site missing the index for local search (see other thread)
can now see results changing further
but not better
some of the sites I now see at the top have been taken by surprise and are unable to handle the amount of traffic they are getting
they are so sluggish they are barely working
Similar - but some keywords still in top 10
Perhaps: Regionality - non-.com's and a bit wary of WMT currently - which is used on our main affected .co.uk site (hit 3rd Dec very slightly up again in last 48 hours )
Interestingly use WMT on .com sites - no such major drop
Re: "lopsided backlink profiles" ... I'm a little unclear as to exactly what this means.
As for my situation, I only have two pages listed Supplemental at the top of my site:example.com listings. Prior to my site tanking, I didn't have any supplemental pages at all in my site:example.com listings.
Re: "lopsided backlink profiles" ... I'm a little unclear as to exactly what this means.
Backlinks naturally occur in a distribution that can be "footprinted" for various types of sites and market niches.
1. directory links
2. 1-way inbound from a content area - the "natural" vote
3. press releases
4. blog and forum comments
5. run-of-site (ROS) links -- suggesting payment or some other business arrangement
6. links from "affiliated" domains (in a Hilltop sense)
7. scraped content
8. RSS feeds
9. article attributions
10. others
The speed with which these various types of links appear is also part of a domain's backlink profile. If the profile is overly weighted toward one or two types of backlinks, I'm pretty convinced that the power of certain TYPES of backlinks gets dampened or even ignored. In other word, Google can tell to some degree when links/PR are being manipulated by the site owner.
Much fuller discussion in this thread:
Natural vs. Un-natural - in SEO and the Google Algorithm [webmasterworld.com]
In summary, we're getting closer to a situation Google would like to see -- where it takes less effort to create quality than it does to imitate quality.
Could these strange December ranking hits be related to off-kilter backlink profiles? I can't rule that one out 100%, because it would take a lot of data to see a pattern like this. But I doubt that Google would be nailing websites by hundreds of positions downward, based simply on inbound links (IBLs). Too easy to take out a competitor if Google were to do something like that.
[edited by: tedster at 12:38 am (utc) on Jan. 5, 2007]
Remember, the google index is down a lot in total pages! So we are not talking hundreds of sites, we are talking millions of sites.
Obviously they have been doing some housekeeping on their index. May be duplicate content!
My website is PR 6 and 2 years old.
My brother's website is PR 7 and also 2 years old.
It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. The fact that both sites still rank highly for the occasional phrase suggests that they are not penalised.
Also don't you think it is strange that no Googlers have posted for quite a while, not even in the Happy New Year thread?
Re: my pages that tanked and backlink profile... Recently I've been writing articles and submitting them to article directories which is something that other webmasters in my niche never do (simply because they're - for the most part - far too lazy). I can't imagine the three or four articles I got published doing that much damage upsetting my backlink profile although it's certainly food for thought.
Is there anyone else who is saw their December rankings plummet drastically by many pages, but does not see supplemental strangeness at the top of the site: results?
A site I monitor very closely, a competitor with top rankings, is exhibiting the exact opposite behavior. All pages supplemental, index and top page or two not listed in site: command. Rankings have not dropped a bit, not once have they disappeared or reappeared during the time frames referenced in this thread. Results in SERPS do not show the index page as supplemental.
Online since 1997. Hasn't changed design in years. Thin site, couple hundred pages. Number 1 or 2 rankings for highly competitive and profitable keywords. IMHO site doesn't deserve the rankings, but it has held number one spots since around '01, so it appears google loves them. Backlink profile = horrible. Most reciprocal, couple hundred at most. Additionally, the site has 2 small company owned sites - separate urls - "feeding" the site. These two sites are also completely supplemental. Some pages of main site have duplicate titles but not duplicate meta description tags. No duplicate content problems.
So why has this site gone completely supplemental? There can only be two reasons: its a google "error" or backlink profile that google doesn't approve of. I feel google has sent the site supplemental due to its backlink profile. But why not a quiver in rankings? Is age of a domain enough to "whether the storm?"
Nail on the head. Profiles are what give the game away, not simply whether a page has Adsense or not. The big question is whether carrying Adsense features at all in the ranking algorithm or not. Google would deny this, but if you were running the show, would you make checking Adesnse pages part of the recipe or not? I know I would!
Google would be better off not doing that. As soon as it would be common knowledge or come out, people would leave in drones, as Google would be seen as corrupt. Their China stunt + adsense is enough already for many people to hate them.
Since I have adsense Google has been the biggest problem.
Adsense is also seen imo more as hobby site program. They do not want professional sites. Again and again mostly hobbyish sites with sometimes abysmal design and content are featured in the adsense blog. Google's business strategy with adsense is to skim of hobbyists not to actually pursue professional sites, unless you are a premium publisher. Then all rules change.
Google will make the most money if it can display ads on their own services. I wouldn't wonder if the adsense program will be terminated if it's starts being a threat to Google's cuddly geek image.
Obviously they have been doing some housekeeping on their index. May be duplicate content!
site:wikipedia.org is down to 19 million. At times it was 100 million.
So I guess stubs, and dual content, which WP is full of, history pages, discussion, user pages and so on.
[webmasterworld.com...]
He does mention wiki stubs
The part that is really interesting is the affiliates though.
Is there anyone else who is saw their December rankings plummet drastically by many pages, but does not see supplemental strangeness at the top of the site: results?
I have one client site that tanked with tons of pages just gone (from around 1400 static non-database driven pages down to less than 235 last I checked, of which the LAST 100 are supplemental - which is around how many they usually have at any given point). Their home page doesn't appear to be in the index anymore at all either (most of their pages are - or were - PR5 and 6) Traffic is a quarter to half of what it was up till the third week of December or so.
One set of results is 34 million results, next set is 14 million. I rank way better when 34 million results are shown. For the past week I have been where I am on the 14 million results version...until a couple of hours ago.
I can't make much sense of that one.
The the easiest away to analyse geotargeting things for google are the analytics data.
So I have decided at first to delete the analytics code for my sites. Maybe it help's.
When I put Ads on my website, I send to them an email for asking if everything was ok, the 04/10/2006 they answered by email : yes, everything is ok. Nothing changed and today they said the opposite.
Well, ok. So before I can correct this problem, I ask them for some informations and I delete all Ads on my website.
I will keep my website without Ads for 1 month, to see if I can see some change in my rankings.
Starting date is today, I've put a mark on each page to follow the refresh in Google SERPS.
My website has a very high Adsense CTR and Adsense earning, so what will be happen? :)
Visitors as usual, ranking as usual, nothing changed since the pages had been between Septebmer 30th and November 2nd well ranked.
And so I have again the complete mystery.
My main website has 10 subdomains.
8 are filtered
2 are since 30th December out of the filter.
All this sites have the same layout, are linked together in the same way. So the complete mystery is, why are 2 of them now good and the other 8 are bad?
Same mystery from June 27th to August 17th.
There had been also several subdomains working well and others had been in the filter. On July 27th a change. Some out of the filter, some more into the filter.
If it would be some sort of roulette game, I would find all logical.
I reckon:
1. Affiliate links and syndicated content.
2. Site wide changes in last x days to some extent.
3. And devalue of link exchanges...again.
Later...and that's just my opinion.
If you look around you see some sites where honestly, they've gone mad on the ads and they're fine, in fact they are no.1 for some serious phrases.
So basically it just seems as a double standard, applied to a few here and there and these are our friends so not applied.
Secondly when sites covering topic A, totally unrelated for topic B, come up prior to sites covering topic A, you need to start asking yourself, is this thing really working or has someone messed up the formula?
I had a very similar experience!
11 subdomains, 9 where hit on April 26th. Then, the same 9 were hit again in June.
It was not until September 15th that Google finally "took out" the final 2.
Perhaps it was due to low spidering of the final 2, I don't know...
Perhaps, if I had known then what I know now, I could have made changes to 'save' them, I don't know...
What I know now is I had duplicate content 'issues' due to links back to home page via index.htm instead of "/" or www.domain.com. I also had some duplicate meta titles and descriptions.
Caryl
I was dumped on Dec 7th, then back on Dec 10th, then dumped again on Dec 26th or 27th. Not back yet.
